Left Truncatable Prime

Recent changes

Table of contents

Links to this page

FRONT PAGE / INDEX

Subscribe!

My latest posts can be found here:

Colins Blog

Previous blog posts:

Additionally, some earlier writings:

2017/10/21 - Left Truncatable Prime

Recently Maths Inspiration produced some pencils with a fantastic idea. Yes, their name is on it:

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/MathsInspirationPencil.jpg

Yes, it has a slightly cheesy catch-phrase:

But then there is something really clever.

I've had some more information about this, and the true story[0] is even better than I thought. Apparently the actual text was "Too Cool to do Drugs" - so that was:

TOO COOL TO DO DRUGS
then: COOL TO DO DRUGS
and then we get: DO DRUGS
Someone has even done a remake of the pencil[1].
My thanks to Stratoscope[2] for the comment[3] on Hacker News[4].
There was a beautiful and now classic example of a marketing fail when someone produced a pencil with the logo "DON'T DO DRUGS". But as the pencil was sharpened the logo was gradually reduced, firstly to the direct exhortation "DO DRUGS" and then finally the simple, dramatic, "DRUGS".

Similarly, then, the prime printed on the Maths Inspiration pencil will, of course, be reduced from the left as the pencil is used and sharpened, but a wonderful thing happens. As the digits are removed from the left, the number that remains is still prime.

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/MathsInspirationPencil_Prime.jpg

It's a left-truncatable prime, which is "A Thing" and you can look it up on the web, but I thought I'd write a quick program to check the one given on the pencil (yes, it's prime), and to see if there was a longer one.

There isn't.

Here's my code. It's intended to be clear rather than clever, but do feel free to tell me what I've got wrong.

Nice challenge: Find a false positive from this prime testing routine.

 
  #!/usr/bin/python

  from math import log

  small_primes = [ 2, 3, 5, 7, \
                   11, 13, 17, \
                   19, 23, 29, ]

  def is_prime( n ):

      if n in small_primes: return True
      if n < small_primes[-1]: return False

      for p in small_primes:
          if pow(p,n-1,n)!=1:
              return False
      return True

  limit = 10
  prospects = range(2,limit)

  prospects = [ x for x in prospects if is_prime(x) ]

  while prospects:

      p2 = []
      for t in range(1,10):
          p2 += [ t*limit+x for x in prospects \
                      if is_prime( t*limit+x ) ]
      prospects = p2
      limit *= 10
      print log(limit)/log(10), len(prospects), prospects

Lovely thing.